Note: warning of impending memory hole

My Seed overlords have let me know that as I have decided to no longer continue this blog, I won't be able to keep the backlogs here indefinitely. Sometime in the next couple of months, the archives will disappear from this site.

I also plan to take down the archives from the blog's former site, in part of an ongoing effort to make it so that people at Vanderbilt don't have to depend on me to maintain computers there.

I have not decided yet if it is going to be worth the effort to try to set up archives on an independent site for posterity. Likely this will not happen. If there is anything you've ever read here that you think you want archived— either because you thought it was worth reading, or because you think you might want to send me abuse about it later— you will want to make copies of it now.

I am going to take a break from astronomy blogging for an indefinite period of time.
I'm finding that as I'm involved in my new job, while I still do get a charge out of posts like the Big Bang post I did the other day, my heart isn't 100% in this.
Also, after the deleted post yesterday, I'm just…

This post has been resurrected from my old blog's location. I've copied the 2006-03-19 post as-is, and I've added a few addenda at the bottom.
I overstimulate fairly easily. This is a serious social disadvantage.
I don’t know how much there is really to this, but I’m attracted to the notion of…

Hello everybody! This is the new home of Galactic Interactions. To those of you who have not heard of me before, you can find older posts at my blog's former location.
I'm an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt University who is still learning how to keep his mouth shut…

Advertisment

Donate

Scienceblogs is part of Science 2.0, a pro-science outreach nonprofit operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Please make a tax-deductible donation if you value independent science communication, collaboration, participation, and support open access.

You can also shop using Amazon Smile and though you pay nothing more we get a tiny something.

More by this author

So here's a modest proposal for film rental / streaming companies like LoveFilm and Netflix: why don't you have shareable playlists like Spotify?
You see, I was reading Time Out's 100 Best Horror Films and I thought, there must be loads of these lists out there, on all kinds of criteria, for all…

As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm…

There is only one truly kosher sport when it comes to the Olympics: athletics. All those ancient Greeks did was run around in the dirt butt naked. It took over fifty years for them to add a second sport: more running, but in a wild twist, a race over twice the distance as before. Over the years…

More reads

If you're making your weekly check of the ebook editions (Kindle, Nook) of my quantum book (I'm not the only one who regularly looks at these, right?), you may have noticed a change: they're no longer sporting the original black cover you'll see in the right sidebar, but a new cover based on the smash hit UK edition. This isn't a database glitch, but a new release, with a new cover and adding the…

Before you ask yourself, "what kind of incendiary title is that," let me put this in perspective. In 2001, I started graduate school at the University of Florida, and in 2002, I took one of the most difficult year-long courses a physics student can take: Quantum Field Theory. This was both the best and worst course I've ever taken. I worked harder for it than I ever have for any other course, I…